By Mike Gray History isn’t what it used to be: Did you hear that ripping sound? Two liberal icons known by their silly stage names — Mahatma Gandhi and Malcolm X — have just been torn down from their sanctified perches thanks to a pair of massively researched but finally damning new biographies. Both men, it turns out, were at pains to take on phony identities. Each hid his homosexuality, each was racist, each took pains to manufacture favorable coverage, each was driven by petty hatreds instead of shining ideals — each of these supposedly principled figures was an out-and-out phony. Perhaps the most delicious irony of this myth-busting is that writers with impeccable liberal credentials are the ones who are doing the exposing — and implicitly rebuking the generations of journalists who actively participated in the distortion and exaggeration. — John Boot Malcolm X’s life story, the one the credulous media have been at pains to perpetuate, was largely a pre-fab job: Malcolm X, a hate-spewing charlatan (“Jews run the country,” he said, while women were “tricky, deceitful, untrustworthy flesh” and a plane crash that killed lots of white people was “a very beautiful thing” because “We call on
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